Daily Briefing

Good morning, and welcome to Friday, May 2. Rick Seltzer wrote today’s Briefing. Julia Piper compiled Transitions. Get in touch: dailybriefing@chronicle.com.

Gatekeeper shopping made easy

The U.S. Department of Education is following through on President Trump’s executive order to reshape accreditation, The Chronicle’s Eric Kelderman reports.

The Trump administration let loose its laissez-faire approach to accreditation on Thursday, moving to promote a market in which colleges can jump between agencies new and old.

• Accreditors are key gatekeepers of federal financial aid. They’re tasked with ensuring colleges provide students with a quality education. A college must be a member of a federally recognized accrediting agency if it wants to draw money from Pell Grants and federal student loans.

Colleges will be able to change accreditors more quickly, the Education Department said. It scrapped review processes from the Biden administration and promised to quickly review change applications from colleges “except in rare cases where an institution lacks a reasonable cause.” Here are the details to know:

• Trump officials mostly don’t care why a college wants to change accreditors, as long as it’s not to dodge the law or regulations.
• The Education Department will approve change applications by default in most cases if it doesn’t act on a college’s application within 30 days.
• A college is justified in leaving an accreditor because it’s unhappy with diversity, equity, and inclusion requirements, according to an Education Department news release. The new guidance suggests a college might also seek an accreditor that better supports its religious mission, changing academic programs, or academic standards.
• States get more control over higher ed. “State legislatures and governors have legitimate authority to manage their public institutions,” the new guidance says. That makes state laws requiring a change in accrediting agencies fair game, including one Florida lawmakers passed in 2022 after clashes with an accreditor.

The Education Department also ended a pause on reviewing new accreditors that’s been in place since October 2024 because of staffing constraints.

Thursday’s guidance builds on previous deregulation under Trump. In his first administration, the Education Department started allowing the major traditional accrediting agencies to break out of old geographic restrictions and recognize colleges across the country.

“Our actions today will ensure this Department no longer stands as a gatekeeper to block aspiring innovators from becoming new accreditors,” Education Secretary Linda McMahon said in a statement, “nor will this Department unnecessarily micromanage an institution’s choice of accreditor.”

Large accreditors cautiously embraced the changes. “C-RAC has previously expressed concern that the current process for institutions to move from one accreditor to another has become overly burdensome and time-consuming,” Heather F. Perfetti, chair of the Council of Regional Accrediting Commissions, said in a statement. “We welcomed an opportunity to reduce bureaucracy, expedite the current process, and eliminate hurdles for institutions seeking a new accreditor.”

But what’s to keep a poorly performing college from shopping for a new accreditor? The Education Department pledged not to approve a change within two years of a college being sanctioned by its accreditor. It left a major loophole: Officials might approve a change if they decide that a college was denied due process, or that an accreditor inconsistently applied its own standards or ignored a college’s mission.

• The door is still open for colleges to pivot under duress. Think of Bennett College, which lost its Southern Association of Colleges and Schools Commission on Colleges accreditation in 2019 because of financial concerns, only to wage a court battle long enough to jump to the Transnational Association of Christian Colleges and Schools.

And might low-quality accreditors flood the system? “There’s cause for concern that the accreditors laying groundwork for Education Department recognition won’t prioritize students’ interests and educational quality,” Jeremy Bauer-Wolf wrote for the liberal think tank New America. “Many of the aspiring accreditors are staffed with officials with a history of either working directly for low-quality, for-profit schools or for the accreditors approving them.”

The bigger question: Is this more likely to set off a race to the top or a race to the bottom in quality assurance?

📱 Read the full story: Education Dept. Moves to Make It Easier For Colleges to Switch Accreditors

More federal news

• Will Trump block new grants to Harvard? The President on Wednesday said “it looks like we are not going to be giving them any more grants,” adding that “a grant is at our discretion.” He didn’t elaborate further. The government is already withholding billions of dollars under existing grants as part of a broad pressure campaign to try to force Harvard to make wide-ranging changes. (Reuters, The Chronicle)
• Harvard faculty pledge donations: More than 80 professors say they’ll give 10 percent of their pay for up to a year to help the institution’s legal fight against the Trump administration. (WCVB)
• NIH moves up research-access deadline: Research accepted for publication in a journal that’s funded by the National Institutes of Health must be posted without embargo in the agency’s public repository starting on July 1, officials said on Wednesday. That means the policy will take effect six months earlier than had been expected under the Biden administration. The Council on Governmental Relations objected, arguing the shorter timeline is burdensome for researchers at a time when the government has already added new certification and financial-reporting requirements. (NIH, Science, COGR)
• Duke plans buyouts: The university wants to cut expenses by $350 million, or 10 percent, in the face of potential federal funding cuts and other federal policy changes. Officials will offer buyouts for some employees whose positions could be eliminated. Layoffs would follow if too few take the deal. Administrators have also frozen hiring, suspended capital spending, paused midyear salary adjustments, and said they’ll evaluate employee benefits. (The Assembly)

Quick hits

• AI researchers didn’t disclose message-board experiment: Reddit moderators objected after finding out that University of Zurich researchers secretly had artificial-intelligence bots post in a forum. One AI account posed as a victim of rape, and another that said it was a Black man opposed to the Black Lives Matter movement. A university spokesperson said an ethics committee reviewed a project about using AI to reduce polarization in political discourse but flagged that following Reddit’s rules and informing human study subjects would be challenging. The researchers have decided not to publish their results. (The Washington Post)
• Connecticut chancellor will step aside: Terrence Cheng will become a strategic adviser starting in July, stepping down from his position leading the Connecticut State Colleges and Universities system a year before his contract expires. He’ll continue to earn his base salary of $442,187. Cheng drew criticism for high spending on meals and chauffeured rides. (CT Mirror)
• Limestone U. faculty want to ban leaders from commencement: About 50 faculty members voted against the institution’s president, chief financial officer, and governing board attending its final ceremonies on Saturday. The vote came Wednesday, a day after trustees determined the private institution in South Carolina had failed to raise enough money to stave off closure. (WHNS)

Weekend reads

• What Is Academe’s Problem With Pregnancy? (The Chronicle Review)
• While Colleges Duck and Cover, Their Employees Feel Angry and Abandoned. (The Chronicle Review)
• There’s Only 1 Historical Precedent for the IRS vs. Harvard Battle. It Carries a Warning for Trump. (Politico)
• An Attack on America’s Universities Is an Attack on American Power (Foreign Affairs)
• A New Sign That AI Is Competing With College Grads (The Atlantic)
• A Crackdown on Diversity Programs Is Reshaping College Graduation Ceremonies (Associated Press)
• With ‘Day of Drag,’ Texas Students Push Back Against University Bans (Texas Standard)
• It’s Time for College Professors to Teach (Manhattan Institute)
• DOGE Put a College Student in Charge of Using AI to Rewrite Regulations (Wired)

Transitions

• Peter West, dean of the School of Liberal Arts at Mercy University, has been named dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Pratt Institute.
• Robert E. Johnson, president of Western New England University since 2020, plans to step down in August.
• Keith Johnson, a professor of engineering technology and chair of the department of engineering, engineering technology, interior architecture, and surveying at East Tennessee State University, has been named vice president for student success.
• Ruth P. Feingold, dean of the college and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Willamette University, in Oregon, has been named vice president for academic affairs and dean of the college at Grinnell College, in Iowa.

To submit a new-hire announcement, email people@chronicle.com. You can also find Transitions online here.

Footnote

As spring commencements get under way in earnest, let us take a moment to remember the poor, underappreciated Silicon Valley entrepreneurs who’ve had no stage to cross.

I don’t mean the billionaire investor and political activist Peter Thiel, of course. No, he received both a bachelor’s and a law degree from Stanford University. I speak of those drawn by Thiel’s eponymous fellowship, which awards $100,000 over two years to young people “who want to build new things instead of sitting in a classroom,” and which requires any recipient who is in college to drop out. And I speak of all the other startup founders who passed through various incubators, toiling for the chance to prostrate themselves before the type of investor that posts manifestos and abhors a buttoned collar.

Fortunately, these aspiring tech titans have decided to play their own pomp and circumstance at an event called Dropout Graduation.

“We just want it to be super high quality, really determined, awesome founders who didn’t find the highest value of their time in school for what they wanted to build,” Ali Debow, one of the organizers, told Business Insider. Debow received a Thiel Fellowship and decided New York University wasn’t the highest-value use of her time last year, leaving to build a new thing: a photo-sharing app. It’s called Swsh.

The idea of Dropout Graduation started, like so many other things in tech, on a lark. Organizers posted an invite on X — where else — and watched the RSVPs roll in. Now hundreds of young founders plan to convene on May 10, donning caps and gowns at a San Francisco theater and even taking a class photo.

No word whether the pictures will appear exclusively on Swsh.